Why We Will Not Promise You a Score Increase

Every page we have written about our own product says some version of the same sentence: we make no promise that this improves your credit score. People occasionally ask why we keep saying it, given that it is not a great sales line.

Three reasons.

It Would Not Be True

Your score is calculated from your entire file. A new reported account is one input among many, and its effect depends on what is already there — how much history you have, what else is reporting, whether anything negative is present and how recent it is. Two people can do exactly the same thing and get different results, and both results are correct.

Anyone quoting you a number of points does not have access to information we lack. They are guessing.

Saying It Would Put Us in a Different Business

Promising to improve a credit outcome for a fee is close to the definition of credit repair, which is a regulated activity with its own statute, its own required disclosures, and its own restrictions on taking payment. We are not a credit repair organisation and we do not want to describe ourselves as one by accident.

What we sell is narrower and easier to state: an account in your name, and the payment on it reported each month.

The Claim Is the Tell

In a category where nobody can promise an outcome, the companies that do are the ones to be most careful with. The promise is not evidence of a better product. It is evidence of a willingness to say things that cannot be supported — and if a company will say that, the question is what else it will say.

What We Will Tell You

• Which bureaus. All three — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Named, not gestured at.
• Exactly what is reported, and that it is reported whether you pay or not.
• That it takes up to two months to appear.
• What it costs, and that cancelling takes one step, no fee, no notice period and no retention call.

That is a smaller set of promises than our competitors make. All of it is checkable, which is rather the point.